Make your money work for you!

Month: July 2017

Since there is a significant amount of P2P portals now available compared to a few years ago, the question quickly arises – how many portals should you include in your portfolio? Is it better to focus on just a few portals, or should you attempt to diversify and reduce risk by including a large amount of portals? How does this change when the total sum of your investments gets bigger? Are there downsides to diversifying?

My current P2P portfolio

As time has moved, my P2P portfolio has changed a lot. I started, like many others with 100% Bondora, but have now completely exited it. I also tried Moneyzen, Viventor and Estateguru, which I’ve also not kept in my portfolio. It definitely took me a while to figure out a selection I like, and it’s constantly changing in time. Currently the balance is as follows:

P2P investments currently make up 47% of my whole investment portfolio. This means, that from my total portfolio the rates are: OR 24%; CE 13%; Twino and Mintos ~5% each. As you can see the exposure to Omaraha is rather big, the exposure to other portals is significantly less.

Liquidity

As with all investments, something to consider is liquidity. With P2P investments liquidity mostly comes from two aspects – firstly the length of the projects/loans (for example Twino’s 1-3 month loans vs Omaraha’s 5 year loans) and secondly the availability of a secondary market (and the speed of trading there).

For me, I’ve decided that for now, liquidity is not a huge priority for me, which means that I’ve allowed my portfolio to move towards longer term locked-in projects. Omaraha does not have a secondary market, and while defaulted loans have a sell-back function, it’s still a rather long term investment. CrowdEstate is also a long-term prospect, since while the projects are generally 1-2 years in length, the portal has a right to extend the projects and there is no secondary market to allow for an exit.

However, a part of my portfolio I’ve still kept rather liquid and this part is carried by Mintos and Twino. With both of these portals, I can easily pull out money from in a matter of days, so if for some reason I need to move money to another investment, or have need for cash, then this portion of my portfolio allows me to do this.

Risk

Now, assessing risk is a tricky thing in the P2P business. While you can look at overall history of the portals, a lot of them are new enough to not have much of a track record. Both Twino and Mintos in theory should be relatively low risk, however since Mintos has at least one loan originator that’s in trouble (and might go bankrupt), it’s clear that things can still go wrong.

The most ‘stable’ part of my P2P portfolio is probably Omaraha, due to the length of experience they have, and the overall stability of the market. However, Omaraha is also prone to all kinds of radical changes (such as the interest cap instated last week), which means that the portal risk itself might influence your long term strategy.

Crowdestate is clearly the most risky part of my P2P portfolio at this point, due to both the type of investments (mostly real estate development projects) and the risk of the real estate market overheating. This means that I will not really allow the volume of investments to increase too much there, I’ve mostly hit the point where I reinvest returned money, and add in less than I used to.

Time expense

With every new P2P portal that you add, there is both an investment of time and money. You need to invest time to figure out how this particular portal works, and how to achieve the best results. Depending on the portal this might require quite a bit of tinkering. For example, Omaraha has been offering great returns, but the time investment in managing interest rates there was also quite a bit of work. In comparison to Mintos or Twino, where you could pretty much just cruise by, using the autobidder function.

Since I invest though my company account, then any new portal also means more bookkeeping, and additional tracking. This means that there isn’t really much point in adding in a portal just to put a couple of hundred of euros into it, it becomes reasonable to add in another portal once the investment is in the thousands already. This means that while I’m currently at 4 portals, it’s not unreasonable to add in a fifth, there just has to be a reason for it – either it offers some different level of liquidity; there is a significantly different risk profile (different sector, country etc.), or an attractive risk-reward ratio.